Labors of Love: the Intersections of Making, Giving, and Community can now be shared in this unlimited electronic edition. (Physical limited edition books exist for project participants and sponsors–y’all will be getting those soon, promise!)
You can read more about the overall project on the main project page: Labors of Love or feel free to go ahead and read the book!

You can browse here:

or download/open and save the pdf through this link.

I’ll have more up about the actual project and exhibition soon, but now I have to get ready for the opening.  :D :D :D

but soon my dears, soon! :)

I’ll give you a small taste of the things I’ve been working on though:

http://shareable.net/
which is a website FULL of information about gifting, sharing, community, and freely available resources of every variety.

http://communiteach.com/ is about how to reach out in your area and teach or learn something. I know a few people working on this idea on a smaller, more personal scale, and I’m so excited to see these resources developing.

http://timebanks.org/ is a way for communities to get together and barter resources and time.

knowing these larger resources exist gives me a bit of hope: that perhaps we really are learning to value connection and community over monetary gain on a larger, cultural scale.
I wish so much that I was a better writer, better at articulation; I see so much going on right now that is addressing the desires that I have to find more and better ways for us to connect to other people and I want to be able to clearly, loudly, celebrate and champion these ideas! I really believe that here, too, is a role for making … for craft, artwork, and aesthetics to tighten this connection between people.
I’m still working on it.

but for now you should have this:

Life is pretty bleak at the top too — and all of the baubles of the rich… they’re kind of this phony compensation for the loss of what’s really important: the loss of community, the loss of connection, the loss of intimacy, the loss of meaning. Everybody wants to live a life of meaning, and today we live in a money economy where we don’t really depend on the gifts of anybody, but we buy everything. Therefore we don’t really need anybody because whoever grew my food or made my clothes or built my house — well if they died or if I alienate them — if they don’t like me, that’s okay, I can just pay somebody else to do it. It’s really hard to create community if the underlying knowledge is … we don’t need each other. Some people kinda get together and act nice or maybe they consume together but joint consumption doesn’t create intimacy — only joint creativity and gifts create intimacy and connection.

So far this has been a strange school-year for me, getting caught in between BUSYBUSYBUSY and dull moments of trying to figure out what to do next.

I did promise myself though that I would post about speaking about community interaction through travel at the 2011 Alliance of Artistic Communities conference. I discussed my roadtrip, of course, as a way to explore a community that I otherwise mainly interact with on the internet. You’re probably familiar with this (since you’re reading my website and all), but, I also found three other Book & Paper interested artists who have taken up travel as part of their practice, and I’d like to introduce them to you. :)

The first fellow traveling book artists I found were Peter and Donna Thomas, who write about their experiences at Adventures of the Wandering Book Artists. These two artists started out their practice by doing hand papermaking demos at Ren Faires and craft fairs, which is where their love for the gypsy wagon they travel in developed. So in 2010, they spent two-third of the year traveling to over 35 states, teaching and visiting art centers along the way!

The next person I digitally-”ran into” was book artist Simon Goode, who came over from the UK to the US to visit book arts centers–he’s looking to open the first book arts center in London. He blogs (posting photographs and writings) about his travels here at Simon Goes, and I narrowly missed him when he came to visit Columbia College’s Center for Book and Paper Arts. awwh. :\ maybe next time, right?

Finally, there is Kyle Durrie of the Moveable Type Truck, and whom my last post was halfway about. She’s still traveling the country, showing off the goodies of letterpress, and she also just visited my dear friend Rachel at Green Pea Press in Alabama! I’m still excited about it, even though it was a month ago and of course here I was in Chicago.

ever onwards~

we hosted our own couchsurfers for the first time (!!!) during the 2011 Chicago Couchcrash (and we loved having you, Nick and Rudy!)

Matt and I with one of our 'surfers, Nick

We didn’t get to go to a ton of events, but let me tell you, the ones we did make it to had the most welcoming and friendly people I’ve ever met. Where else could you find 150 people at a party, 95% who have never met each other before, half of whom don’t even live in the state, and everyone having a fabulous time?
There’s really something here about generosity building community.

Then classes started, which means thesis. Ah yes, that word that inspires so much creativity and dread. Who knew it would be so hard to write about my thesis proposal in under 150 words?

And, last but not least, last weekend I visited the Renegade Craft Fair, a now-international DIY craft market that started here in Chicago in 2003.
I was merely wandering around finding cute things (like these gems)

until we stumbled across…dun dun dun…Moveable Type! I wish I had gotten a better picture, but if you’ve ever been to Renegade, you know it was packed–but that’s a good (even great!) thing. :)

I had heard about Kyle Durrie’s traveling letterpress project (yup–another traveling member of the bookarts world!) and knew she was hovering around the Great Lakes area, but didn’t know she’d be here!
Squee!

visitor printing, Kyle on the right

I only got to geek out for a minute over her travel maps

before I got to use her proof press to make my own Chicago-themed Moveable Type print

ILSSA print from 2010's Printers Ball on top, Moveable Type print on bottom

thank you so much for coming to Chicago Kyle! I wish you the best on your travels. Happy printing!